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Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Armed coup attempt against brutally homophobic Gambian president seems to have failed

The BBC said both military and diplomatic sources say soldiers from the presidential guard attacked the presidential palace in Banjul early Tuesday, but President Jammeh wasn't in Gambia.
Gambian radio aired a governmental statement denying a coup attempt, but later Mr. Jammeh confirmed the attack, which he claimed came from invading forces from Senegal loyal to a "disgraced" former soldier and that four attackers were killed and four more were captured.
Jammeh said he would be:

"returning from my state visit to France
immediately," but a French foreign ministry spokesman said there was no
indication Mr Jammeh had been in the country. Some reports say he is in
Dubai.

...eventually landed in the Chadian capital of N'Djamena in a plane bearing the presidential emblem, according to Reuters.
That plane took off from N'Djamena late on Tuesday after a reported
refuelling stop, during which Jammeh told officials in Chad he was
returning home, a senior Chadian government source said. The pre-dawn assault near the presidential palace in Banjul triggered
panic in the tropical city, while national radio went off air for
several hours and state television was suspended. Opposition politician Sheikh Sidya Bayo told a private Senegalese
radio station that the unrest was "the start of a mutiny that changed"
into a bid to topple Jammeh. Three of the suspected coup plotters were killed and another captured
by Jammeh's forces, but there was no confirmation of an overall death
toll from the fighting.

...Jammeh was quoted in
February as saying, “We will fight these vermin called homosexuals or
gays the same way we are fighting malaria-causing mosquitoes, if not
more aggressively.” The U.S. responded last week to Jammeh’s long history of institutional homophobia by excluding Gambia
from the African Growth and Opportunities Act, something activists
praised as a first step toward addressing LGBT human-rights abuses in
the country. Gambia was exporting around $37 million in goods to the
U.S. each year duty-free before the suspension placed on its ability to
receive benefits from the act.

Maynard (Bob "Gilligan's Island" Denver) slyly flashes a nipple to the CBS eye while trying to talk his best buddy Dobie Gillis (Dwayne Hick­man) into taking off all his clothes. Whoever said 1950s television was a vast waste­land obviously didn't know where to look.